Hungry Read Online Free Page B

something else must have happened. As with many diseases, the rule you often hear about eating disorders is “Genetics loads the gun, and experience/ cultural pressure/trauma pull the trigger.” Depression and weight/ body image issues are as common as colds in America, yet most of us don’t become anorexic. We all navigate relentless media and social pressures to squeeze our imperfect selves into a very narrow band of acceptable appearance and accomplishment. Everyone is exposed, but some are more vulnerable, especially teenagers and young adults struggling to figure out who they are. What comes through clearly, though: Be thin.
    And yet, good luck, dear, because you’re going to be around food all day, everywhere. Even in a bad economy, Americans have a turbulent relationship with food, more love/hate than appreciative. Rarely are we neutral about eating. Every food and food product is good or bad for our health and spiritual well-being, and the planet’s. Give each food an A or an F, rarely a C. While food items shunned one day can be resurrected by new findings or, more likely, suddenly found to be harmful, we feel more comfortable assigning them to one extreme or the other. We aren’t the only society to endow food with religious properties, but since the Puritans, it seems, we’ve never been able to relax about eating. Food is sinful or celestial.
    Lisa got caught up in the sin, living in the original hotbed of food worship, the San Francisco Bay Area, with two foodie parents. We obsess. And I’m a food writer. This came as a shock to my family because I used to be the One Who Didn’t Eat.

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    Foodies with Issues How Sheila Met Ned and Planned to Eat Happily Ever After
    Two frantic grandmothers flutter around one new mom and a child who won’t eat. In the 1950s, I am the one in the highchair, batting away all incoming spoons. In the eighties, it is my first child, Jacob. His maternal grandmother has to think, “Just desserts for Sheila” on one hand and “Not this again” on the other.
    Maybe the early pickiness helped form me as a food critic, but eating just wasn’t that appealing. I stayed small and came late to just about every physical milestone. In photos of birthday parties I am the shrimp among prawns. Would I ever really need a bra? At last, I got my period at fifteen and then grew another two inches in college, to the average American woman’s five-foot-four. All that family angst about my eating and growing had been for nothing. I was normal.
    Still, when baby Jacob zipped his lips against cereal and bananas and everything most children love, or spit them out, no memory or rational thought could stop me from flying straight into red alert. Children eat, sleep, and grow. That’s their job description. Jacob was a slacker in all departments.
    Just like me. In our family, we were the children who didn’t eat.
    My mother respected the grandmothers, for their child-rearing experience and for their leadership of the family. Mom was not quite twenty-one years old, having dropped out of UCLA after her freshman year to marry a buoyant twenty-four-year-old war veteran who ran the family jewelry business with his brother and uncle. Mom didn’t have a lot of confidence that I would survive without my grandmothers’ forced feedings. “Very often it was both of them, trying to get you to eat,” Mom says. “They were afraid you were going to starve to death.”
    Medical professionals in the fifties pitched into the kitchen wars by telling Mom to stop nursing and put me on the bottle. I wasn’t getting enough milk. “I was not an eater, either,” Mom says. “My mother put me through the same thing.” We seem to be a line of slow learners.
    I was the shortest or next-to-shortest in every class, always in the first row. Each December in our elementary school’s unfortunate production of scenes from The Nutcracker , Cookie Fukutome and I could not be missed in the “Waltz of the Flowers,”